How working at Brooke
makes you a better teacher:
Great teaching closes the achievement gap. All kids deserve great teaching, and at Brooke, we are committed to providing our students
consistent highly effective teaching year after year after year. We believe teaching is a knowledge profession, much like medicine or law, and to
excel, teachers must have regular opportunities to continually improve their practice. We only hire teachers who get this – who know that
teaching is hard, that it is a huge intellectual challenge, and that they can and must constantly grow their teaching skills. We hire teachers who
want to constantly improve, and then we promise them that as Brooke educators, they will receive support to become better teachers. We do
this by articulating our beliefs on how we improve our teaching and then by committing to providing the structures that enable this growth.
At Brooke, our guiding belief is that we become better teachers through:
 Collaboration – getting a chance to work and think with other mission-driven, thoughtful colleagues
makes you a better teacher
 Feedback and self-reflection – talking about your teaching and getting the outside perspective of
others makes you a better teacher. Similarly, watching and thinking about your own teaching,
especially when coupled with a conversation with another person, makes you a better teacher
 Access to new ideas - observing other teachers and considering their effectiveness makes you a
better teacher, as does reading professional literature on pedagogy or content.
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Because we believe in collaboration…
Because we believe in COLLABORATION
Our commitment
Why this matters
You will have an opportunity to co-plan units We believe that the best work comes from
and lessons with at least one colleague.
group sharing their thinking and pushing
each other’s thinking. Working with other
smart, dedicated colleagues gives us all an
opportunity to refine our thinking, become
more articulate in our priorities, challenge
each other, and share best practices.
You will participate in one lesson study per
year.
Lesson study, the Japanese model of
professional development, allows teams to
collaborate on the creation of a detailed
lesson plan that tackles historically difficult
material. Then teams receive an
opportunity to present their work to
observers from within the Brooke network
(and possibly outside viewers as well) and to
engage in a specific, focused conversation
about the effectiveness of this lesson. We
believe this helps us all develop the critical
analysis skills that we can direct back to our
own curricular planning.
What this will look like
You will work on a grade-level team that
involves two to five people. During
professional development, you will have
time to co-plan a year-long scope and
sequence and unit plans with that. You will
have at least 7 days before the start of the
school year to co-plan with your teams.
During the year, you will have at least 45
minutes of dedicated co-planning time, but
wherever possible, teams will have their
non-teaching periods at the same time
during the week and can therefore build in
more co-planning time on a daily basis.
Once during the year, teams will be given a
structured series of professional
development time to select a lesson study
topic, consider the unit plan, receive initial
feedback on the unit plan, develop a
detailed lesson plan, revise the lesson plan,
execute the lesson, receive feedback from
viewers, and then revise the lesson plan
again.
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Because we believe in feedback and self-reflection…
Because we believe in feedback and self-reflection…
Our commitment
Why this matters
What this will look like
You will get feedback from an instructional
leader at least 20 times a year.
We think that teachers grow fastest when
they have frequent, timely feedback based
on frequent observations. Administrators’
main job is to support teachers in their own
performance, and so most of their time
should be spend observing teachers and
giving personalized feedback to teachers.
During these feedback conversations,
teachers and administrators engage in
conversations about purposeful choices.
You will be video-taped at least 10 times a
year and will have a chance to reflect on
that video and then engage in a
conversation around the video.
We believe that teachers can be more
reflective of their own practice when
watching their teaching from a distance that
is not afforded while in the act of teaching.
Just like professional athletes study videos
of games or matches, teachers should study
videos of their classes to have a chance to
observe and then discuss the video with an
administrator or peer.
An instructional leader will spend
somewhere from 10 to 60 minutes in a
classroom. Sometimes the leader will
schedule these ahead of time but often they
will not. Leaders will attempt to take all
requests for observations, schedule
permitting, and teachers are encouraged to
ask to be observed on anything they would
like more feedback on (such as new things
they are trying or a follow-up lesson if a
lesson didn’t go as expected). At least 16 of
the observation feedbacks will be in-person
meetings rather than just email or written
exchanges.
During the year, we will set up opportunities
for you to be filmed by a Flip Cam. After the
lesson, the person filming will upload the
video to our school’s Google video page.
Once it is uploaded, then an instructional
leader will email you to set up a time to
meet the next day. Before that meeting,
you should watch the video and gather any
reflections to discuss. During the video
conversation, you and the instructional
leader will discuss the video, starting with
anything that the teacher noticed while
watching himself/herself.
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Because we believe in feedback and self-reflection…
Our commitment
Why this matters
What this will look like
You will get feedback from a peer at least
twice a month.
We want to develop a professional
community where teachers feel confident
and comfortable engaging in personal
conversations about teaching with each
other. We will receive opinions from our
colleagues but more importantly, we will
have opportunities to engage in relevant
and specific conversations about our
teaching. We grow by receiving feedback
from multiple sources, and peer feedback is
a vital part of this growth.
You will receive unit plan feedback.
We want to hit the big ideas with kids and
teach so that our material sticks with kids
for the long-term. To do that, we need wellorganized units that effectively develop an
understanding of big ideas. We think our
units are best when we co-plan them with
others and then get an outside opinion of
the logic of that plan.
You will be assigned a peer observation
partner for each two-week period of the
school year. During that time, you and your
partner will observe each other – it is up to
you two when the observations will happen.
After those observations, you will meet to
engage in a conversation around those
observations. Then during the next
biweekly period, you will either have a new
partner or you will keep partners for a
longer period of time to allow repeated
observations.
When you complete a final unit plan (at
least two days before beginning that unit),
email that unit plan to Kimberly and your
principal. Within 24-hours, you will receive
written feedback from Kimberly and
sometimes from the principal as well. If you
would like to meet with an instructional
leader to talk further about the unit plan,
please just ask for a meeting. The
instructional leaders might ask to meet to
talk about the unit plan.
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Our commitment
Because we believe in feedback and self-reflection…
You will have a chance to examine your own
achievement data regularly (as often as
weekly) and then engage in data discussions
with an instructional leader and with your
co-planning team.
Why this matters
We are always working hard to make sure
students succeed. But without measuring
our student’s success, we cannot know
whether that hard work is effective. The
true measure of teacher effectiveness if
how much students learn. Looking at
frequent interim assessment data allows to
always know and reflect upon what our
students can do; it enables us to make midcourse corrections to accelerate student
learning. Looking at this data in teams also
helps us benchmark our achievement as a
collaborative team against ourselves, our
past performance, and where available,
against the performance of other students
in other districts. Only close and frequent
examination of our interim data will enable
achievement-gap shattering results.
You will receive mid-year feedback on your
Everyone needs regular opportunities to
mastery of our teaching standards and a
pause and reflect on progress thus far. We
chance to reflect on your level of mastery on all get involved in the day-to-day curriculum
each standard and your goals for the year.
and the immediate progress of our students,
but we need built-in mechanisms to ensure
that we take the time to reflect on the big
picture and engage in conversation about
how things are going overall. Mid-year
conversations provide us the opportunity to
learn from instructional leaders how he or
she evaluates our teaching standards
mastery and also an opportunity to reflect
on our own mastery of these teaching
standards.
What this will look like
In grade levels with self-contained
classrooms, grade level teams will meet
weekly with an instructional leader to
discuss the results of that week’s
assessment. Data will examine different
disciplines each week – for instance, math
might be analyzed one week, then writing
the next, and then social studies the next.
This is to ensure that we strike a balance
between preserving instructional time and
collecting accurate and frequent assessment
data. During these scheduled meetings,
teams will examine grade level data as well
as individual class and student data to
determine what should be retaught, what
should be addressed in small groups, what
additional support individual students need,
and what we can learn from each other.
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Because we believe in feedback and self-reflection…
Our commitment
You will receive student surveys at the end
of the year so that you can learn how
students considered your class.
Why this matters
What this will look like
We know that our students are watching us
closely throughout the year. We value their
input and gain perspective by considering
their impressions of our teaching.
Furthermore, we gain perspective by
considering their self-reporting on their own
actions, such as how often they read at
home.
At the end of each school year, we will
administer consistent student surveys for
each cluster. Over the summer, the
leadership team will enter that data and
compile summaries of the data. During
August professional development, we will
learn the results of these students across
the school and within clusters. Each
returning teacher will also see the results for
his or her individual class.
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Because we believe in access to new ideas…
Because we believe in access to new ideas…
Why this matters
What this will look like
You will get to observe a peer at least twice
a month.
During peer observations, we can glean best
practices and consider how other teachers,
in the same teaching community with the
same values, conducts class similarly or
differently from ourselves. Furthermore,
observing and discussing teaching with our
colleagues helps us refine our beliefs about
what makes teaching effective; from
watching and evaluating the teaching of
others, we can develop skills that we can
then direct back on our own teaching.
You will reflect on and build your capacity in
the essential components of effective
teaching through whole-school professional
development focused on teaching
standards.
We believe that great teaching closes the
achievement gap. So we need to define
great teaching, discuss great teaching, and
work to develop our ability to provide great
teaching. Weekly professional
development should build this capacity
through direct, focused, and specific
conversation about what great teaching
looks like and how we can consistently
provide it.
You will be assigned a peer observation
partner for each two-week period of the
school year. During that time, you and your
partner will observe each other – it is up to
you two when the observations will happen.
After those observations, you will meet to
engage in a conversation around those
observations. Then during the next
biweekly period, you will either have a new
partner or you will keep partners for a
longer period of time to allow repeated
observations.
Each week during our professional
development block, we will engage in a 45minute session focused on developing one
teaching standard. Each teaching standard
module will look distinct because sessions
will be tailored to develop that individual
teaching standard, but they will usually
involve some form of video and/or
examination of student work. Most
modules will last about 9 weeks.
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Because we believe in access to new ideas…
You will develop curricular proficiency
through a year-long examination of a
targeted achievement area.
You will visit another school each year and
gain best practices or comparative
reference through this school visit.
You will have access to any professional
reading material you need or want to
improve your practice.
Why this matters
What this will look like
Teaching is hard. We can work on it forever
and never perfect it. Each year, we select
an area of our curriculum where we think
we can improve our achievement. Then we
work in grade level clusters (primary, upper
elementary, middle school ELA, and middle
school math/science) to improve our
achievement in this area. This constant
striving for greater achievement prevents
complacency and ensures that we are
always working to give kids what they
deserve.
Teaching suffers when it happens in a
bubble. Just like we visit each other’s
classrooms to learn our own school’s best
practices, we should visit other highperforming schools to learn their best
practices. Visiting other schools allows us to
develop our own perspective, examining
what works within our model and what we
can change in response to the new ideas we
can take from other high-performing
schools.
As teachers with a growth mindset about
our own learning, we are constantly seeking
to improve our practice. There is a limit to
what we can learn through feedback and
reflection – some things we need to learn
from experts in the field and from research
studies. We constantly strive to keep
current on new information about
pedagogical practices and to deepen our
knowledge of our content field.
Each year, the instructional leaders, with
input from the entire teaching staff, selects
an achievement focus for each of our
clusters. Every Wednesday, we will devote
45-minutes to working with our cluster to
examine our own practice, research best
practices, and create and implement plans
for improving our own practice.
Once each year, every teacher will visit a
high performing private, suburban, or urban
public school. Ideally, we will visit in multigrade level teams (for instance a team of 3
teachers representing 3rd, 4th, and 5th
grade). The visit will focus on one specific
learning goal – for instance examining how
that school approaches social studies
instruction
When you identify resources you would like
to and will commit to reading, you should
complete a purchase order for that
publication and we will order it for you. If
you would like to read the text with others,
consider asking your colleagues to be in a
book club with you. At times, an
instructional leader will ask you or your
team or everyone to read a text, in which
case, they will provide copies for you.
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